From a badass Bond to a tedious Ted
Film purists can snort all they like, but 2012 was a great year for the silver screen (with some turkeys, of course).
Life of Pi: not enlightening, but compelling
Ang Lee’s film of Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel does spirituality badly but storytelling brilliantly.
A damning indictment of the War on Drugs
Eugene Jarecki’s documentary, The House I Live In shows the damage done by prohibition to inner-city communities.
Making a drama out of a hostage crisis
The weirdest thing about Ben Affleck’s 70s-set thriller about escaping from Iran is that it’s (mostly) true.
What’s so noble about Anonymous?
In the latest in our series of spiked shorts, our film reviewer Tom Slater takes an axe to 'hacktivism'.
Must-reads from the past week
Paul Thomas Anderson: no longer the Master?
The arthouse director has made a sequence of high-quality films, but his latest - about a religious cult - is a boring mess.
Heroes and zeroes in the fight for gay rights
Call Me Kuchu captures the bravery of Uganda’s gay-rights campaigners and the cynicism of ‘gay-friendly’ Western politicians.
Judi Dench: the ultimate Bond girl
Skyfall successfully drags Bond into the twenty-first century by putting a decent female character centre stage.
Not poetic, just patronising
Beasts of the Southern Wild has garnered much praise, but its message seems to be that the poor like being poor.
On the wrong road
The long-awaited film version of Jack Kerouac’s seminal Beat generation novel does the book’s reputation no favours.
